It sounded too good to be true: On Friday morning, as the East Coast woke up to one of the biggest IT outages in history, caused by a glitch in a CrowdStrike update, a rare image went viral on X, garnering millions of views: Sphere, a flashy new addition to the Las Vegas skyline with 580,000 square feet of programmable LEDs on its exterior, appeared to succumb to a blue screen.
But a Sphere representative said the photo was digitally altered. Sphere escaped unscathed from the CrowdStrike outage that affected computers running Windows across the global economy.
It's easy to believe this photo is real – after all, we see blue screen of death images in airports and hospitals around the world – but there are some clear signs that this vaporwave dream isn't real. Firstly, the image of the sphere is the only “proof” that the sphere was affected, yet publications such as the Daily Mail and the Express Tribune reported the doctored image as fact.
Meanwhile, on the Sphere's YouTube livestream, people can clearly see the Sphere in action, making them wish that the funny idea of a “BSOD Sphere” were a reality.
Image credit: YouTube screenshot via TechCrunch
Taking down Sphere is interesting in theory but low risk, but it's an example of how easy it is for inaccurate information to spread online during times of global chaos and panic.
In a more serious trend of misinformation, terms like “cyber attack” trended on X, and searches for “cyber attack” spiked on Google. However, according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, this is not a security incident or a cyber attack. Rather, the well-known cybersecurity company pushed a flawed update that caused outages on Windows hosts. However, due to the nature of the flaw, some consumers are blaming Microsoft for the issue. Making matters worse, Elon Musk, who has 190 million followers on X, has been reposting memes implying that Microsoft is the culprit.
The CrowdStrike update comes after Microsoft experienced an overnight disruption to its Microsoft 365 services, but the current CrowdStrike outage is unrelated to last night's issue, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.